Lead Platform Engineer (Database)

Lead Platform Engineer (Database)

Adore Me, a Victoria’s Secret & Co. company | Bucharest, Romania

Working model: Hybrid – 2 days per week in the office

Reports to: Engineering Manager

Salary range: 13.000 - 18.000 RON net/month, based on experience and final assessment

About the role

Adore Me is looking for a Lead Platform Engineer to join our Platform Engineering team. You will be the senior technical authority for the platform's data and cloud-foundation layer, anchored in deep, hands-on expertise operating production databases at scale - primarily self-managed MySQL - and extending into the broader stateful systems and cloud infrastructure that sit around it.

At Lead level, ownership comes with authority: you make the architectural calls in your areas, and other teams build on top of the decisions you make. You'll work alongside senior engineers who own the runtime, delivery and observability layers, and you'll be expected to troubleshoot wherever a problem leads and build enough context to reason about the platform as a whole. You'll build into full ownership of the surrounding stateful and cloud systems over your first several months.

What you’ll do

• Own the architecture, availability and lifecycle of production database infrastructure - primarily self-managed MySQL - including replication, failover, upgrades and incident response.
• Set technical direction for the platform's wider stateful and cloud-foundation layer (caching, messaging, cloud networking, cloud governance) as you take on ownership across these areas.
• Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code practices for shared platform infrastructure, including modularization, CI, drift detection and safe change patterns.
• Contribute to the operational health of Kubernetes/GKE workloads and other core platform services.
• Lead response to high-severity incidents in the systems you own, driving root cause analysis into lasting, systemic fixes.
• Participate in the on-call rotation and champion safe, well-verified change management for critical infrastructure.
• Act as an advisor to other engineering teams on platform standards, design reviews and reference architectures for the systems you own.
• Contribute to capacity planning and disaster-recovery exercises, including restore validation and failover testing rather than documented procedure alone.
• Reduce recurring operational work through automation, and build operational depth around you so no critical system depends on one person.

What we’re looking for

• 5–7+ years of experience in platform engineering, site reliability engineering, systems engineering or production infrastructure, with demonstrated lead-level ownership of critical production systems.
• Deep, hands-on experience operating self-managed databases in production - MySQL strongly preferred - including replication, high availability, upgrades and incident troubleshooting.
• Strong hands-on experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform preferred) in production environments.
• Solid working knowledge of Kubernetes/GKE and the ability to troubleshoot problems across infrastructure layers.
• Strong Linux, networking and storage fundamentals.
• Working knowledge of a major cloud platform (GCP preferred), or comparable depth in another cloud with the appetite to transfer it.
• Experience with monitoring, alerting, on-call response, incident analysis and safe change management.
• Ability to automate operational work using Bash or a comparable language.
• Ability to understand a broad production architecture and reason about how its components interact.
• A pragmatic, structured approach to AI-assisted engineering - knowing how to establish guardrails (tests, code reviews) to leverage AI without compromising code quality or security.
• Strong written and spoken English, including the ability to explain technical risk, incident status and proposed changes clearly.

How you work

• You take ownership of the systems you're responsible for and follow through on commitments end to end.
• You remain calm and structured during incidents, ambiguity and shifting priorities.
• You make architectural calls with confidence, and you're comfortable being the final word in your areas of ownership.
• You communicate clearly and adapt your message across technical and non-technical audiences.
• You influence other teams through evidence, sound judgement and reference architectures rather than relying on authority.
• You build operational depth around you - through review, pairing and documentation - rather than holding all the context yourself.
• You balance strategic thinking with a pragmatic focus on the work that creates the greatest impact.

Nice to have

• Experience supporting high-traffic e-commerce or similarly complex, customer-facing platforms.
• Experience leading platform-wide change initiatives or modernisation programmes.
• Experience with ProxySQL or another MySQL connection-routing layer.
• Experience with Redis, RabbitMQ, Pub/Sub or other shared stateful systems in production.
• Familiar with GCP project/IAM structure, cloud cost management or cloud network security at scale.
• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch or comparable observability platforms.
• Familiar with Flux CD, GitOps, Istio or Kubernetes platform automation.
• Experience with database failover tests, restore exercises or other disaster-recovery drills.
• Relevant database, Linux, cloud or Kubernetes certification.

Compensation and benefits

Salary range: 13.000 - 18.000 RON net/month, depending on experience and the final level assessment.

Adore Me employees in Romania benefit from:

• Private health insurance
• Meal tickets and vacation vouchers
• Early education reimbursement
• Christmas, Easter and annual performance bonuses
• Learning and development opportunities support
• Adore Me and Victoria’s Secret employee discount
• Special vacation days
• External parking provided
• Corrective and protective eyewear support

Adore Me is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and qualified applicants, without discrimination on any basis protected under applicable law.